updated 01:10 pm EDT, Tue August 9, 2011

Some regions of US still underserved

(Updated with info on new Utah store) Apple will throw open the doors to its first Alaskan store on Saturday at 10AM local time. The outlet is based in the 5th Avenue Mall in Anchorage, and will operate from 10AM to 8PM on Saturdays, and 11AM to 6PM on Sundays. Regular weekday hours are scheduled to last from 10AM to 9PM.

Many regions of the US still have conspicuous gaps in Apple Store coverage. A disproportionate number of shops are based in California, while a handful of states, such as the Dakotas, still have no locations to speak of. Several states continue to have just one shop to speak of, some examples being Maine and New Mexico.

Also opening on Saturday is a store in Conestoga Mall in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. The city is not major one; the launch is nevertheless significant because Waterloo is home to Research in Motion, the maker of BlackBerry smartphones and the PlayBook. The store may in fact be intended as an aggressive competitive gesture, given that the Conestoga Mall is only about eight minutes' drive from the RIM campus.

With the Italian and Australian openings planned for this weekend Apple still has 24 more outlets to debut by the end of September, according to its own announced timetable.

Update: Another Saturday opening has been announced for Murray, Utah, bringing the number of locations needed by September 30th down to 23. Murray is within the Salt Lake City area; the outlet will be based in the Fashion Place mall.

has Ballmer

started opening more Microsuck stores? I thought he said he wanted to have as many as Apple. Better get at it, Monkey Boy. It takes a lot of work to lose hundreds of millions of dollars on a failed vanity project.

Waterloo…

…is also a university town. Its residential population hovers just under 100,000, but the two universities in town bring upwards of 20,000 students into that mix. Factor in the populations of Kitchener and Cambridge into the mix as well, populations 200,000 and 120,000 respectively, since they are all so close (so close the only way you can tell you've crossed from Kitchener to Waterloo, for example, is a street sign announcing your welcome into that city).

Nearby Guelph, with a population of 118,000 and a large university population as well, will be served by a Waterloo store, as it would certainly be worth the drive just to stay out of Future Shop. So now you have over half a million people within a 30 minute drive, plus the folks coming from west of the city along the 401 realizing they no longer have to make the drive into Toronto or Mississauga for their Apple fix, and suddenly, the "not major [sic] city" seems to make much more sense.

comment title

Hey Apple, How about Vancouver Island? Nanaimo would be great. WoodGrove mall is the biggest mall on the island. Somewhere in Victoria would be OK too. Not all of us live in Vancouver (there's three of them over there.)